Posted by Chad Orzel on January 9, 2011 
A reader from the UK, James Cownie, was kind enough to send this picture of the “New and Bestselling” shelf at a WH Smiths ” at one of the service stations on the M20.” You might not recognize the cover immediately, but in the #11 spot on that list is occupied by How to Teach Quantum Physics to Your Dog, the UK version of my book. Or, given how well it’s doing there, perhaps I should start referring to the cover pictured in the left column of the blog as “the American edition…”
Anyway: Woo-hoo!
Wait, I can understand the different cover design for different markets, but why did they add “Quantum” to the title? Is “quantum physics” sexier than regular physics in the UK? Or is it there was already a “How to teach physics to your dog” in print there?
Note that, in the UK, a ‘service station’ is what we would call a highway rest stop (not a gas station).
It probably is just “sexier”.
Or it could be that we’re sufficiently well educated over here that we’re just not interested in ordinary physics. :-)
My dad’s birthday is coming up and he likes this sort of thing, so I might increase your UK sales a little more.
I got it for Christmas (in the UK), and read it the other day. It really is an excellent book.
However, the British edition does read as if it has been heavily edited for British readers by somebody who believes that British readers live in caves. I may be wrong, but it appears that took through Prof. Orzel’s fluently and confidently written text and went s/American colloquialism/More or less roughly comparable British colloquialism/. The result is clunky. It’s also insulting. Nobody is going to read a book like this who is unfamiliar with standard American English. British people watch American movies, read American fiction, probably get their coverage on American news from the CNN website. We’d like publishers to treat us as intelligent people who do get out sometimes.
Obviously this isn’t a problem unique to HTTPTYD. Some bright spark retitled Stephen J.Gould’s “Full House” for the UK market because they thought the term would be unfamiliar. Like Brits don’t play poker? What?
None of this is in any way critical of Prof. Orzel or his fine book. But I think he might be doing himself a favour next time if he could persuade his UK publisher to leave a perfectly good text alone.
@chris #4: It goes the other way, too. American editions of Harry Potter books, I’m told, have been edited to take out British-isms that the publishers assumed Americans would be unfamiliar with. I’ve also heard that Disney has edited the word “blustery” out of Winnie-the-Pooh books under the pretext that American kids wouldn’t know what that word means (as if they couldn’t figure it out from context).
Chris y, I’ve not read the book (in either form), but there are situations where US colloquialisms are deeply ambiguous to a Brit. Probably the most infamous is “to table” a motion: in the UK, that means to bring it to the table to discuss, whereas (if I’m understanding correctly), the US meaning is more like “to shelve”, to put it aside to consider at some unspecified future time. Or maybe “pavement”, which in British English means the sidewalk (we don’t have a specific word for the wheeled-traffic-bearing part of the road). If, on the other hand, they’re changing obvious things like boot for trunk, then that is a bit silly; but you could also easily end up with a confusing mess where some passages have been translated and others not, which will not help reading flow either.
You've read the blog, now try the books:
How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog is published by Basic Books. "“Unlike quantum physics, which remains bizarre even to experts, much of relativity makes sense. Thus, Einstein’s special relativity merely states that the laws of physics and the speed of light are identical for all observers in smooth motion. This sounds trivial but leads to weird if delightfully comprehensible phenomena, provided someone like Orzel delivers a clear explanation of why.” --Kirkus Reviews "Bravo to both man and dog." The New York Times.
How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is published by Scribner. "It's hard to imagine a better way for the mathematically and scientifically challenged, in particular, to grasp basic quantum physics." -- Booklist "Chad Orzel's How to Teach Physics to Your Dog is an absolutely delightful book on many axes: first, its subject matter, quantum physics, is arguably the most mind-bending scientific subject we have; second, the device of the book -- a quantum physicist, Orzel, explains quantum physics to Emmy, his cheeky German shepherd -- is a hoot, and has the singular advantage of making the mind-bending a little less traumatic when the going gets tough (quantum physics has a certain irreducible complexity that precludes an easy understanding of its implications); finally, third, it is extremely well-written, combining a scientist's rigor and accuracy with a natural raconteur's storytelling skill." -- BoingBoing
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